Scam over Steve Jobs death on Facebook®

On October 5, 2011, the co-founder and CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs passed away. This news shocked everyone. He was considered as an innovator and a tech visionary, who took Apple to the top. As a matter of fact, he was not keeping well for some time and this is why he stepped down from the position of Apple’s CEO. But his death was not expected to come so early. Just after the release of Apple iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, Steve Jobs left the world. Instead of paying their homage to this great man, some evil minds tried to took advantage of his death. They posted false surveys in the name of Steve Jobs over the Internet.

According to a security firm, it was reported that the scammers posted a fake post on Facebook that was about a company giving away 50 iPads in the remembrance of Steve Jobs. In relation to this, The Graham Cluley, senior security consultant at Sophos said, “Sickeningly, as with the deaths of other figures in the public eye, there are scammers waiting to take advantage of bad news.” So, it is quite a big challenge for the users to turn a blind eye to such scams.

This time, the scam was sent out on the walls of Facebook users along with a picture of Steve Jobs within two hours of his death. Since then, the URL has been visited by 25,699 users from 100 countries. Surprisingly, the title of that particular post looked akin to regular wall posts. It was simply titled R.I.P. Steve Jobs, which was enough to grab the users’ attention. This link was directed from Bit.ly, and the scammers smartly posted the link by shortening the actual URL. On seeing the post, many people clicked on the link, which directed them to an online survey that was necessary for them to get the iPad for free.

Sophos, the popular security firm was the first one to reveal this fake scam. On getting the news, the company requested Bit.ly to remove the link. Initially, the scam was spreading through Facebook site, but later the link was shared through e-mails and instant messengers. It was recorded that approximately 43 percent of clicks were from the United States alone.

Usually, the motive behind such scams is to attract Internet users and steal their personal credentials. Even though, this scam was detected quite early, but this may not be the case always as you cannot stop scammers from coming out with such scams in different forms. You never know, the scammers might request you to make a donation for Steve Jobs.

So, watch out for such scams, especially when you are logged on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.